An Evening with Michael Steinhardt: No Bull (talk + Q&A)

Hello, evening, everyone. Good evening, Michael, David, and Ezra, and Jacob. Hello, happy Hanukkah, everyone. Uh, tonight is the fourth night of Hanukkah, and we hope everyone is having a wonderful, enjoyable holiday, and thank you all once again for joining us on our Sunday, uh, evening, uh. There are a few people out there in this world to whom it can be said that they potentially touch the lives, enrich the lives of a major portion of the Jewish world. Our speaker this evening, Mr. Michael Steinhardt, is one of these rare individuals. If you look at the Torah, you will see that we were created in this world to work, to make a difference. This is why God created us. And you see this at the very beginning of the story of Adam and Eve, because Adam was created and placed in the Garden of Eden.

Now, people think the Garden of Eden was some type of paradise, like a long vacation on an exotic tropical destination, where you sit on the beach and you drink martinis all day. That's the image that we have. But if you look in the Torah, the Torah says that God created Adam and placed him in the Garden of Eden, l'ovdah u'l'shomrah, to work the land and to guard the land. He was created to work the land. And this is the source that we were created in this world to make a difference, to accomplish, to impact, to achieve, to uplift the world around us. And our speaker this evening understands this principle dearly. Michael Steinhardt by trade works in finance, but his passion is the Jewish community, and he really, really wanted to make a difference.

We will hopefully hear tonight a little bit about some of his many projects, but he's the most well-known for to serve as the co-founder of Birthright Israel, and the premise of Birthright is very simple. It is that every Jew deep down in their soul has a magnetic pull to the land of Israel and to Jerusalem. Now, it might be covered by many, many layers, but it exists deep down in their soul. So if you take a Jewish kid, a boy or girl, who's never been to the land of Israel, and you show them the beauty of the land, of Jerusalem, of the Western Wall, something will spark within them. And that is exactly what has happened over the past 20 years. Over 750,000, again, over 750,000 young men and women who have never been to the land of Israel on a group trip,

were able to go free of charge, and by doing this project, it has invigorated American Jewry to have a greater connection to the land of Israel and, at the same time, help Israel immensely in the process in a variety of manner—manners, including economically. This is just one of Michael's many projects. But I personally was privy to have an inside perspective on another one of his projects, which, Michael, I'm not sure if you know or not, but Mr. Steinhardt joined together with Aaron Wolfson, Mr. Aaron Wolfson, many years ago to open up an alumni division for Birthright Israel in the West Village here in Manhattan, which was headed by Rebecca Sugar, a member of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue. And I had the privilege to work for this organization for over 10 years.

And it provided alumni programming for the Birthright students and the men and women when they returned to New York. Shabbat dinners, hundreds came at a time, return trips to Poland and to Israel and to Prague, and the Holocaust, you know, to visit the camps. And thousands, thousands of these students, young men and women, when they returned, young professionals to New York, had a community that they were able to join. And from then, from that point, many of them joined other communities, some even getting involved at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue. I can attest firsthand for witnessing this phenomenon. This is just one of the many accomplishments that Michael has done in his life. He's done a lot of good, incredible projects. He's worked on... Fascinating, interesting man. If we're lucky, maybe we hear a little bit about his zoo in his home in Bedford, which I had got a chance to visit that one time, and when we were there, um, uh, when you had everyone over a number of years ago.

It's a great honor to have you. We want to thank you for everything you've done for the Jewish world. I want to personally thank you for the opportunities you've given me here in New York City to get involved in the young professional Jewish community for so many years. And it's a great honor to have you. To formally introduce Michael will be his son, David, who could give you a much more descriptive account of his father's many, many projects. And we hope that both you, Michael, and David, get more involved at the synagogue. We'll have good seats, nice seats available waiting for you. And I only wish you and your family much health and happiness and great reward for all your important work. I now give the mic over to David to introduce his father.

Thank you, Rabbi. About an hour ago, I got an email from my mother telling me that I should wear this new blue, beautiful blue sweatshirt that she got me for Hanukkah last night. And now I know why: or she got the same one, or she must have gotten the same one from my dad before. So we are dressed in coordination, which is great. Anyway, there's hardly a shortage of material when it comes to thinking about an introduction of my father. Considering tonight's virtual venue, a focus on his Judaism seems to make most sense. But as someone who's been his son for over 51 years, what is his Judaism? I should know, but do I? What I do know is that he openly calls himself an atheist, but I'm not sure I believe it.

When he was a teenager on Yom Kippur, he ate food in front of his upset mother in defiance of the holiday. But I know that when I was a child, he would bring me and my siblings to Shlomo Carlebach's shul for Shabbat and holidays because he loved the Jewish spirit and the music. Later in my life, I was sent to Hebrew school at Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue. After that, my brother and I were Bar Mitzvahed at Reform Central Synagogue, my sister Bat Mitzvahed at Reconstructionist SAJ, and now my parents belong to B'nai Jeshurun, where, despite the rabbi's crazy liberal politics, the spirituality conveyed through the music is fantastic. All this Jewish jumping around, of course—this doesn't mean my father is a believer or an atheist, but I know it's indicative of a searching for spiritual satisfaction that to me doesn't really match up with the term atheist.

Of course, even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and let him get away with this atheist stuff, there's no way of avoiding the fact that he's a passionate Jew. He wasn't much older than I am today when he retired from his business and focused his energy and money on helping improve the odds of secular Jews to stay Jewish. Hence the creation of programs like Birthright and OneTable. Speaking of being a passionate Jew, a couple of years ago, the New York Times tried to rip him down in a story accusing him of having a politically incorrect sense of humor. Indeed, I can attest he does. But why pick on him as their target? Three reasons: because he loves the Jewish people, because he loves Israel, and because he is a rich, successful capitalist. The editors of that paper are pretty clearly not fans of people like my father.

But now that's old history. And my father, who turned 80 last week, has been thriving during this hard COVID period, spending time with my mother and many of his 13 grandchildren, walking, reading, even working on his new book, which maybe he'll talk about tonight. So without further delay, I'll turn the Zoom over to Ezra and my dad.

Thank you for that wonderful introduction. And I think it sort of is—it's a very easy segue to the first question for Michael, which is: attentive to what David was saying, this tension between a claim to atheism and an extraordinarily attentive ear to the spiritual aspects of Judaism is something that you've been trying to resolve for decades. It'd be interesting to hear where you think things are in tension, where you think things are easily resolved, and what your thinking is on the matter, you know, as you've just turned 80.

Well, I don't feel that there is a particular tension anymore between my being an atheist and whatever I feel about being Jewish. There was a time when I was uncomfortable being an atheist. But that time is long past, and I am unequivocally an atheist, and I am unequivocally passionate and in love with the Jewish people. I used to say—I'm not sure, I might regret saying it now—I used to say, 'I love Jews. I love good ones, bad ones, handsome ones, ugly ones. I just like Jews.' And that still holds. I still just love Jews. Maybe I'm a bit more selective than I once was. Maybe I'm not. But, uh, that's, uh, neither here nor there. And, uh, being a Jew for me is about being part of the Jewish people, which I see as my extended family. We are an exceptional people. We have a unique thirst for knowledge. We exhibit a unique striving

for excellence. I'm proud to be a Jew, and I'm especially proud of everything Jews have accomplished, especially in the realm of secular achievement, like science, the arts, business, and entertainment, and the creation of the State of Israel, which, uh, manages to create for itself a vast amount of secular Jewish culture at almost every moment. By the way, David Ben-Gurion was an atheist, and no one doubts his complete commitment to being a Jew and working for the survival and prospering of the Jewish people. I really don't understand why people find it strange for an atheist to love the Jewish people and want to fight for it. You know, this whole idea of being Jewish as only a religion, I think, is sort of a goyish idea.

It comes from the Reform Jews having tried to fit being Jewish into a box similar to Protestant or Catholic. It's just not how I see things.

Well, you know, you mentioned David Ben-Gurion as a comparison. One could claim that he headed and put into effect the single most successful form of secular Judaism ever invented called Zionism in the State of Israel. And historically, some of the opposition to the State of Israel from religious sources in part underscores the tension that they certainly saw between, let's say, a God-centered Judaism and the secular-centered Judaism. But by creating the State of Israel, he solved perhaps the single greatest threat to secular Judaism, which is in the creation of an Israeli identity as perhaps opposed or supplementing a Jewish identity. The issue that I think a secular Jewish theology, to mix a metaphor, needs to face is the threat of assimilation.

That is, the assimilationist threat to secular Judaism in its Israeli context is one proposition. The threat of assimilation to an American secular Jew who loves the Jews and is deeply concerned about their future just promotes the question: how does secular Judaism... Well, let's ask, how—how do you think of secular Jews, and how do you define it in a sentence or two? Now, how does it come to grips with perhaps its greatest threat, meaning assimilation? In Israel, for the last century, Jews have built a whole culture that connects them to their history, their traditions,

and the Hebrew language and translates it into a vibrant Jewish life today without necessary theological commitments. There is no reason why we can't do something similar in the Diaspora, leading a rich, proud, committed Jewish life. How does this... I'm sorry, Ezra.

I was about to say the idea of secular Judaism addresses the problems of assimilation and intermarriage. And it does so by emphasizing, as I do, the key of Jewish pride. Jewish pride is what it's all about. And assimilation happens when you don't pass on to your children the knowledge and the joy and the pride of our people. Kids grow up ignorant and ambivalent. If, instead of hiding our achievements, we celebrated them and added non-religious opportunities for young Jews to engage with their people—powerful experiences—our studies show that they will be a lot less likely to intermarry and a lot more likely to raise their children as committed, engaged Jews.

So I guess the question I was going to ask, I can—I can still ask, which is, I wonder in your case specifically, to what extent some of your thinking on this subject, uh, started at a time and in an era where, in which assimilation was simply—and intermarriage was simply—less of a threat. That is, if it wasn't—if it wasn't going to threaten the ongoing vitality of the non-God-believing, enormously large percentage of Jews, then in many ways your most difficult problem sort of got assumed away. This notion of instilling pride as the animating force generationally down—I guess my question is, how does that work with what you might think is a requirement of Jewish education? Can one do this at home?

Does where one sends one's kids to school matter in that context? Or is it such a powerful global sort of, you know, you know, Type O blood donor that one can just do it within the context of one's house?

Well, let me step back a bit. I was brought up in Bensonhurst, a Jewish-Italian immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn during and after World War II. It was before everyone moved out to the suburbs. We were traditional, but our identity was primarily not religious so much as ethnic. We had a whole Jewish world in New York that included restaurants and entertainment, also synagogues and schools. We were proud to be Jewish. I became an atheist as a teenager when I saw the refugees from the Holocaust who came to live in our neighborhood. And I just couldn't make sense of a God who had promised to protect us and had brought us what we saw then. But this doesn't take away from my commitment to the Jewish people.

If anything, seeing them made me a more committed Jew. When I was 21, I took my first trip to Israel. And I must say, since Judy and I have been married for 52 years, and we've been to Israel at least once, at least once in each of those 52 years... When I was 21, I took my first trip to Israel and was just amazed by the achievements and the spirit of Israelis, how they had redefined what a Jewish life looked like, one that builds its own infrastructure and farms and factories and an army. That was, for me, a living Jewish ideal. As my career on Wall Street took off, I felt something was missing. I thought about the people I admired, my Jewish heroes, if you will, people like Ben-Gurion and Albert Einstein and Louis Brandeis, and none of them, none of them were money managers on Wall Street.

I was one of the most successful people in finance, but somehow it wasn't enough for me. In the late '80s and early '90s, I began to realize that the most important thing I could do with the rest of my life would be to tackle the problem of assimilation. The non-Orthodox Jewish world in America was evaporating. Young Jews were intermarrying and raising their kids with little or no connection or identity. I wouldn't stand by and watch it happen. Whatever the Jewish establishment was doing about it, it wasn't working. So I launched something called Jewish Life Network, which later became the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life.

If you were to give advice to, let's say, some of the younger families listening and watching, and you were to think about yourselves, you and Judy, and were raising children who were now beginning to be of school age, would you make, without necessarily getting into the names of schools, would you make the same general educational choices today if you had, say, someone starting first grade or kindergarten, or for that matter, someone starting high school, that you did then in connection with your sons and daughter?

That's a serious, thoughtful question. And I must say that in my children's educational experience, that which has impacted me more than any other has been Ramaz. And again, at the risk of repeating myself, I'm an atheist. Maybe there are some other atheists at Ramaz. I'm not sure I know any, but Ramaz was a wonderfully impactful institution for the six of my grandchildren who went there.

And if, I say, it a little bit harkens back to this notion of Jewish pride and this notion of Ahavat Yisrael, of love of one's fellow Jews, and a sense that all Jews are responsible for each other, is this notion of pride going to do it by itself, or is some form of formal Jewish education—and, in the case that you described, not a non-Orthodox Jewish education—going to work? As you look forward and as you think back, all at the same time, as some of these problems have evolved, as, for example, your own thinking has evolved, you no longer see any great tension between an atheist view and this enormous love of one's fellow Jews. As the problems have evolved a little bit and as the solutions have evolved a little bit,

What choices would you make educationally? Are there non-Orthodox educational choices that you think are available today that you would point to for younger couples starting to raise children? What would you say? "You know, send your kids to Ramaz and have an extraordinarily impactful education. I'll worry later on about how strong their sense of love to fellow Jews is. And if for some reason they end up being secular Jews, that's fine. They'll be educated secular Jews." And just, I'm sort of seeking guidance as this all integrates through your experiences of just wrestling with this for so many years. And some of the guidance may be it's still a wrestle, but I'd be curious to know whether there are clearer answers, smoother answers than "it continues to be a wrestle."

The question of education goes beyond that of a day school or a public school or the variety of other choices that we have available to us. And the overwhelming word that I think captures the issues of education is quality. And for most Jews who go to afternoon school, who have had the education that I've had, the question of quality is wretched and indeed leaves a lot to be desired, and therefore it makes a Ramaz that much more appealing because the quality, the Jewish quality in Ramaz dwarfed the Jewish quality I had in my afternoon school education. And, in some sense, education takes a lot of forms. One of those forms would be Birthright. Birthright is part of Jewish education. And I know from my own experience and that of a lot of, a lot of other people, how powerful a first trip to Israel could be in

educating one in instilling Jewish pride. But the existing programs before Birthright only got a few thousand young adults to come each year, and they were mostly already engaged Jews. So Birthright, which one wouldn't necessarily think of as an educational phenomenon first, was just that. The idea of Birthright was that it could bring people over to Israel as a gift from one generation to the next, and that could scale up and reach a much larger proportion of Diaspora Jews. Now, that's in and of itself a phenomenon of education, but not of the education that any of us knew pre-Birthright. It goes with its own peculiarities. I first raised the idea of Birthright with my friend, Charles Bronfman, and together we brought in other donors.

We met with Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1998 and asked if Israel could pay for a third of its costs. At that point, Israel hadn't paid for anything philanthropically in the Diaspora, but he said, 'I can do that.' And we took it from there. So Birthright has been much more successful than other Israel programs that came before it. It was revolutionary in some ways. We spent more than a year designing it. It was a short trip, easy for people to fit in their lives. We offered a broad range of different types of trips from outdoor trips to athletic trips, to spiritual trips and outsourced the programs to different competing organizations. So there was also an element of choice—a marketplace to meet different tastes.

We demanded an intensive experience at a high level. I'll use the word again: quality. It was free, which was hugely important for people who weren't otherwise going to come. But more importantly, perhaps, it was the first time ever that the State of Israel worked together with private philanthropy to do something for the Diaspora. It all came together into a product that huge numbers of people wanted with the possibility of scaling up dramatically. We began in December '99, and to date, over 700,000 Diaspora young people have come to Israel on this program.

Well, that sounds truly, truly wonderful. I want to retrieve my hypothetical younger couple starting to raise children to focus on these two modes of education for the moment, day school education and Birthright Israel, and wonder the following: you've said over 700,000; Rabbi Babich mentioned 750,000. I want to ask a question that might be indiscreet, in which case one just moves along. Do you have any idea of what the cost of that was over the course of the last two decades plus?

What the cost of the Birthright experience was? Yeah. Yeah. It was about $3,000.

Per person. Per participant. So if you took that figure, right, which... Well, if I were trying to start out and be a good Jew and target my charitable dollars as effectively as possible, and resources are limited. And I'm not talking about the group that you pull together to start Birthright. I'm talking about parents who are raising children and paying tuitions either in private schools, day schools, or are otherwise somewhat constrained charitably, would you consider Birthright an absolute priority as a charitable donation? Would you say try to balance that with some form of day school education charitably? How, how, how do these things compete in your eye, uh, in your mind's eye as a couple tries to raise children with this sense of Jewish identity and Jewish cohesiveness without necessarily, uh, looking for an Orthodox education or an Orthodox life?

Well, one has to start by saying that Birthright is a 10-day trip. And it's for people between the ages of 18 and 26. And that's what it is. So most kids who go on Birthright who are non-Orthodox are not, by the standards of say, the Orthodox world, highly educated. They are anything but highly educated, but what Birthright does for them is it creates a spiritual response that most varieties of Jewish education have not been so successful in creating. We have done vigorous studies that compared Birthright participants with those who applied but didn't end up going and what their Jewish lives look like 10 and 20 years later. It's clear that it's had a big effect. Birthright participants are 40% more likely to marry another Jew and 60% more likely to have a mostly Jewish circle of friends.

We're getting something like, before COVID that is, 50,000 Diaspora Jews to come each year, which is more than half the cohort of non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews, which means over time more than half of non-Orthodox Jews will have gone and felt the impact of it. We are making a real dent in assimilation with this one amazing trip at the right time of life. But again, I emphasize it's 10 days, costs $3,000. It's very different than education from the age of four or six or 10, et cetera, et cetera.

Jacob, did you want to ask something about education?

Yeah. So Michael, um, you keep on saying the word quality. So, uh, can you, can you define that a little more clearly? You were saying Ramaz-quality education, Birthright's quality experience. Um, can, can you help us, uh, how do you define quality?

I define quality as a manner of communicating the highest level of Jewishness possible to the person who's being exposed to whatever it is, whether it's a Birthright trip or whether it's a Ramaz education or other school's education. Quality allows that participant to feel at the end of that experience that he has come a long way Jewishly. And that's the manner in which I use the word quality.

So, it's a personal—is it a spiritual, is it an emotional experience, is it an intellectual experience?

In the ideal world, it's almost all of that. It is a spiritual experience, an emotional experience, an intellectual experience. Ramaz, I think, is for most of its cohort, all of those things as well. However, we're talking about exceptions now. You know, if you've gone, as most non-Orthodox Jews have gone, to an afternoon program, it has not allowed the quality that could have been to be there, and it's one of the great failings of American Jewish education. Also, can you talk a little bit about, um—

We spoke about being proud to be Jewish, meaning, you know, you mentioned your childhood when you were younger. But, you know, why is it that, you know, how do you feel that you give the next generation that positive enthusiasm? You know, some people have it, some don't. How would you?

I use the word pride because I think more than any other word, with a possible exception of quality, pride is what young Jews really need. They need pride in the State of Israel. They need pride in their people. They need pride in associating with the great Jews that they know of, either because they've lived proximately or lived a long time ago, but somehow those people communicate a sense of pride in the average younger Jew.

And what's going on on the college campuses today, where there's so much negativity, is that something that bothers you, concerns you, or...?

College campus reflects, in some sense, the circumstance of most of those Jews who did not have the benefit of a good Jewish education. And when they get to college, it shows up because they don't know very much and they don't really participate in the few things that colleges have to offer. And colleges don't offer so much. Hillel, for instance, does not manage to achieve, for most of its participants, elements of Jewish pride.

Okay, thanks. Thanks, Ezra. Sorry.

No, Mike, I just wanted to sort of digress for a moment and, partly because of the topicality of your birthday and, to some extent, Hanukkah, ask you the following. Really, many years of yours and mine, conversations, you know, schmoozes, debates, and so forth. So, you were born on December 7th, the last time that anybody could say that that was December 7th and not Pearl Harbor Day. The next year was Pearl Harbor, and after that, December 7th has been Pearl Harbor Day. The war ended when you were, say, five going on six, and the State of Israel was founded when you were, let's say, roughly eight. Do you have any childhood memories of those experiences? Do you remember the war ending? Do you have a sense of what it was like to be in Bensonhurst as an eight-year-old when the State of Israel was declared?

I do. I have a strong sense, even at that young age, of the circumstances leading to the birth of the State and the birth of the State itself. And it was a very profound experience, even for an eight-year-old, to know that something of magnitude that we hadn't experienced in our Jewish world up until then had just taken place, and we knew this was something of great importance, and we knew it in Bensonhurst, and we knew it throughout the Jewish world.

Was the founding of Israel—and I'm just sort of curious, thinking back on your youth—like, what made you care so much about being Jewish? I mean, if you could highlight, like, the first thing—I mean, the way you grew up, was it that? Was it Israel, what you just said? Or was it some other experience? Or did it come later in life when you were in college? Because you didn't get it from home, did you?

I got a little bit of it from home. I didn't get it in an educational sense at home, but I got it in the sense that my mother loved being Jewish, and she cared about the Jewish people, and the overwhelming number of people in her life were Jewish. I sometimes go through a bit of a routine with many people, and I'll do it with you all, where I ask my friends, "If you think about the people in your life who care, who you care most about—not your family, but the people in your life who you care most about—and say, can you name 10 of them?" And I think most of you probably can. And then the question is, how many of those 10 are Jewish? Here we're living in the United States, where 2% of the population is Jewish, but for most Jews, certainly in my generation, the overwhelming number of close associations

have been with other Jews. It's been eight out of 10 or nine out of 10, or, in some instances, 10 out of 10. So, going back to your question, what really matters? That really matters. And why it really matters is something we all should introspect ourselves. But the fact is that it does, and it matters for us living in the United States, where 98% of our co-citizens are not Jewish. It matters for us in all sorts of ways which are beyond intellectual description.

Well, you know, if you send your children to Ramaz, chances are most of your friends are going to be Jewish. Guess they'll have the chance to meet others along the way, but, uh, I mean, as you know, I, you know, my children are not going to Jewish school, and whereas Sarah's children are in Jewish school, it's interesting. It's, it's something that I thought a lot about, sort of that difference. Um, the, I don't know, but you sent me to a non-Jewish school. Is that, I think maybe that was part of Ezra's question looking back. Do you sort of wish that you, uh, if I had gone to Ramaz with that, if you could get a redo, would you have sent me to Ramaz or something like it at the time?

I'm not, I'm not sure. I mean, we have lived in the same apartment for 52 years. When we bought that apartment on 97th and 5th, we were the only jews in the building and that was discomforting to us a little bit but over time more and more jews moved into the building and most of our friends are in that building but but what it means to have jewish relationships is hard to know I know you, my son, really well. And when I ask you, of your 10 closest friends, how many of them are Jewish? Do you have an answer?

It's sad, but I can only think of like three friends right now, so I'll have to get back to you.

Ezra's included?

Of course, of course. They're mostly Jewish. But I mean, it's, I want to go off, too, on a crazy tangent, but I've always, I felt like being, living in America and being an American, that there was great value in getting to know all kinds of people growing up. And living in New York, you know, where my daughter goes to school, which is not Ramaz, she's meeting all kinds of characters. Um, whereas where your grandchildren who are at Ramaz, they're also meeting all kinds of characters, but they're the Syrian Jews and they're the, you know, the upper, Upper West Side Jews and they're the, you know, the, yeah. So I don't, I don't, it's, it's not that we have to dwell on this topic much more, but just, I think it's interesting.

What's your point about, uh, there being many different types of Jews? I think, knowing you intimately for your 51 years, your closest friends are mostly Jewish.

Yes, that's true. Ezra? In my case? Are you asking me?

How many of them are not Jewish?

The only question is how small or how large a minority?

Okay.

But if you want me to actually think of who the 10 are, one or two of them are Jews who you could easily mistake for Gentiles. But there's probably two and a half out of 10. I could give this a little more serious thought. Two and a half out of 10, not Jews. But to be clear, I did go to day schools all my life. I actually spent quite a number of years studying Jewish texts full-time. But I also ended up at Columbia and Harvard. And so the mix is a little different. And it takes a lot of years to get that done. I'm attentive to everything you say and sensitive to some of the questions that David is asking. Years and years ago, you told me once, 'I really want Jews to be more like the Jews I knew when I was growing up in Bensonhurst.'

And I hear a little bit of an echo of that again this evening and wonder, whether to put it in the lingo of something we're not talking about tonight, whether that trend is not behind us to some extent. I wonder whether the world hasn't moved on and that therefore this notion of 'I am all for Jewishness and I'm not quite sure where I am on Judaism' has a different, pitches itself differently every generation. I spent a little bit of time talking to David about some day school choices that he was facing for the little guys, not so much for Lila, but for Leo and Eli. And he was a little bit attracted, he was a little bit attracted to choices he had made, were made for him and he had made for his daughter.

I just wonder, and I go back to what I said earlier, all these choices take place in one context if one has certain reassurances about intermarriage, and all these choices take place in a very different context if one doesn't. And the great safety, the great ingenuity, the great originality of Ben-Gurion is, yeah, sure, I'm a secular Jew, it's called Israeli. But what is the secular Jew called in the United States—an American Jew? And you want to posit an American Jew who is a secular person who loves Jews, who retains a sense of Jewish identity in a society that is as porous and as permeable as possible. And it's a challenge. And that, that porousness was not what you had in Bensonhurst between the ages of one and, you know, I'll say finishing high school, um, the way it is today.

And so David Steinhardt is facing a different set of challenges in raising and schooling his children than Michael is, than Michael was. That's called normal. That's all to be anticipated.

And David's children will themselves face a different group of challenges than he's facing.

And so if I were to bring this all back together, do you think the 750,000 Birthright alumni will actually make choices in terms of Jewishness—I leave Judaism out of it for the moment—that will reclaim a possibly lost generation the way in which you incredibly ambitiously and perhaps successfully tried to reclaim a generation?

The measures that we have of that are positive vis-a-vis Birthright, but can't ignore and don't ignore the fact that if you're a Jew and you grow up in Sacramento, California, and there's one Reform synagogue in Sacramento, California, and you maybe go on Birthright, but you go to that synagogue for a bit, and then you go to one of the University of California schools. What's going to keep you Jewish? It's a very challenging thing. And the fact that Birthright has had a meaningfully higher rate of in-marriages than those who might have gone but didn't go, it's suggestive that it's going in the right direction. Is it going in the right direction enough? I'm not sure. We need four or five more projects of the size and impact of Birthright if we really want to rein in assimilation.

It's hard, but it's possible. But again, let's put it in context. America is 98% non-Jewish. What do you do to keep those 2% staying in the fold? It's not easy. And the things that we've tried to do, I think, are in the right direction.

Could you perhaps, if you think this makes sense, talk a little bit about what you had in mind with the Hebrew charter schools, if that fits into this?

Sure. Sure. Hebrew language is a substantive element of Jewish civilization, but doesn't necessarily make any religious claims. As a person, I want to meaningfully increase the number of American Jews who can speak and understand modern Israeli Hebrew. Hebrew is a key to being connected to Israel in a most intimate way. Connection to Israel and Israeli culture is one way of focusing on Jewish content and substance without religion. This has been essential to our work in our creating Hebrew language charter schools. Now again, this is a real challenge, uh, because we may have eight or nine thousand young people, half of whom are not Jewish, going to these schools. But if you met these kids and you saw them speak Hebrew, you would be awed by the quality of conversational Hebrew that they experience.

I suppose, I don't want to be reductive, but I could ask the same question again. Do you, would you counsel a Hebrew language charter school to parents who were seeking your advice on Jewish identity and Jewish education—would you counsel that? Is that something that you would have said to David as something he might have considered as he sifted through his educational choices? I'm just saying, how do you fit that in a framework of day schools on the one hand, Hebrew charter schools on the other? Who's the audience? Who is it intended for?

Let's talk about Hebrew language charter schools. The first of these in 2009 in Brooklyn, we now have 14 schools on 10 campuses. Charter schools are public schools that are independently run. There are many dual language charter schools in the US. So we said, why not Hebrew language charter schools? My daughter, Sara, has been leading this effort and she's the chair of an organization called Hebrew Public. Thousands of children across the country study in these schools. These are public schools. They don't teach religion. We teach all the general study subjects, but then we teach modern Israeli Hebrew every day. And we teach Israeli culture. And that has so far been terrific. It's a drop in the bucket, but it's been terrific.

Can I ask a question, Ezra? So yeah, the, the, some of these questions sort of are interesting to me because they're, they're sort of asking you about, you know, the programs and how successful they have been and how successful they could be. And it's sort of, I'm thinking back about your, you know, you had an investment record, one of the best investment records when you were in business. And then you had this, you know, for years have been doing, I don't know, over 25 years or something, these philanthropic programs, all with one sort of goal that we all understand what that goal is. But if you, if you, you know, then when Ezra said, how much is that? How much are Birthright programs? That's $3,000, 750,000.

I actually had to look it up because my math is not too good, but it's over $2 billion spent on Birthright, right? So if you took, let's just say that you took all of those dollars that were spent on not just your programs, but lots of programs. And you said, I'm going to go back in the time machine. I'm going to take all that money. And I'm going to put it in things that are more sure, for sure. For sure, I think what Ezra is maybe hinting at is with David Ben-Gurion, if you go to Israel, you're going to stay a Jew. The odds are much higher that you'll stay a Jew if you live in Israel than if you go on a Birthright program and return to California, or if you go to a Hebrew charter school, or if you're me.

If you had taken all those billions of dollars and said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm either going to push as many people to live in Israel as possible or get as many people to convert to Orthodoxy as possible. Because those are the two, those are the, give you the two highest odds of continuing the Jewish people in the highest numbers as possible. What do you think of that? Like, is that sort of crazy? Is that unrealistic? Is that, and sort of forget about the people like me, I guess, who are sort of more, you know, half-in, half-out possibly.

I don't know. The people like you who are half-in, half-out is the focus, is the key to what I try to do. But let me say, because the question hasn't been asked yet. What have been my failures? Where have I tried something and not succeeded? Because what I have done, and I haven't quite said it yet, is I've not been satisfied with the Jewish institutional world, with the federations, with the AJCs and the UJCs. All those three-letter things have not interested me at all. And what I've tried to do are things that are my own innovation. So I can't take credit for the Hebrew language charter schools myself, it's more my daughter, but it was a new exciting idea that hadn't been tried before. There was something else we tried that worked for a while, and then I made a mistake and gave it to the 92nd Street Y.

That was called Makor. And Makor was an organization for secular Jews in their 20s and 30s. I bought a building on West 67th Street, and it endured for quite some time, and it was wonderful. And I felt really good when I went to Makor and saw these young people there. And many of them became more committed through that experience. Is it a lifetime's commitment? I'm not sure. Then I started something else called OneTable. And OneTable, I started with a man named Paul Singer eight years ago in order to promote Friday night Shabbat dinners for young adults. We support Jews in their 20s and 30s with hosting each other in their homes and apartments as part of their rhythm of life. To date, over 150,000

unique individuals have been engaged in Shabbat dinners, and tens of thousands more have participated in online Shabbat events. Thousands do OneTable every week, hosting or attending unique Shabbat dinner experiences that they find through the OneTable website. Again, by creating a platform that offers people choice and maintains high standards and doesn't pressure them to be religiously observant, you can create amazing, pride-building Jewish programs, projects that can scale up massively. Now, you might say, 'Shabbat dinners, isn't that religious?' And I would say it is a deep, profound, fundamental part of being Jewish. So there are a lot of things that one can do. I don't think that the Jewish world is exactly flying at the moment with new ideas, with novel ideas,

with creativity, and I try to create things that are going to, in the long run, help the Jewish people. One of them that I'm involved, trying to be involved in now, is with the Haredi population. In the United States and in Israel, there are about a million and a half Haredi Jews. Most of them live in poverty. Most of them get a very poor education. And I hope over time to improve their education so that they won't live in poverty and that they will become part of a greater and more wonderful Jewish world without in any way impacting their religiosity. That's what I try to do.

David, did you want to continue that a little bit, or?

No, no, I was going to ask a totally different question, though, that popped into my—I was thinking about it when I looked at some of your former speakers on this, on the series, and I saw that Abe Foxman had been a speaker. And my dad and Abe have been friends for a long, long time. But over the years, when I was growing up, I recall my father sort of poking fun at Abe, saying, 'You know, you're such a great, talented guy. Why are you wasting your time on antisemitism, fighting that battle?' And so my question to my father is—because I think a lot of people are interested in this and concerned about antisemitism, always a concern, and then sometimes a little more concerned, sometimes a little bit less—

Are you, are you, or are you not concerned about antisemitism, um, whether it's for you and your wife or your children or your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren to come in this country? And what do you—why not be concerned?

I am not deeply concerned about antisemitism. And when I look back on the ADL, which has been around for an awful long time and devoted the totality of its energies to fighting antisemitism, I don't think that's how you fight antisemitism. I think you fight antisemitism by having Jewish pride, by emphasizing quality, and ultimately those things will lead to less antisemitism than otherwise.

David, would you answer those questions, your questions, a little bit differently?

No, no, I don't.

All right. Gentlemen, you have to advise me what you want to do. We are past the time that we have allotted to this, and we have a very large audience, and they have questions. One of the things we can do is simply invite everybody back and pick this up where we left it off, say, after the holidays, if you have the patience for that and if that's something you want to do. If you want to continue tonight, we can, and we can do both. But you have to let me know how you... We asked you for the hour. It was very gracious of you to give us the hour. The hour is at least 10 minutes past that. So I'm just looking for some guidance. Lots and lots of things to talk about.

Maybe take two questions, Dad, something like that, two or three questions.

Sure. Okay. Jacob, do you want to pick a couple off the rack?

There was one question that came in. Michael, can we talk about post-Birthright follow-up programs?

Sure. One of our failings, I would say, is not to have created a rigorous post-Birthright program. However, we have created OneTable, which does just that. It brings kids who are typically in a post-Birthright age to Shabbat dinners, and it enhances their Jewish life enormously. I had wished that we would have done more post-Birthright, and maybe sometime we will. There's just so much one can do. There's another program that I started about 10 years ago called Birthright Excel, which you may have heard of. It's much smaller than Birthright. It has about a thousand graduates, but it sends young people to Israel for three months to join a technology company, a financial company, some really high-quality Israeli enterprise.

And even though most of these kids can't speak Hebrew terribly well when they go, when they come back, they have had a deep, meaningful Jewish experience. I hope that's an answer to your question. Yes, I mean, you know, our rabbi, Rabbi Babich, worked for the JEC. I know you were partners with the Wolfsons, and I think that was, uh...

Very successful program. I had a question for you. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, and we'll try to wrap up so we can get you and David back, because it was a great evening for—we really appreciate you doing this for us, Michael. Do you ever think about Birthright? You said it was $3,000 a kid, and no one paid, right? Correct.

Well, the kids didn't pay, by far. I should say out loud that there's been one philanthropist who has been the dominant philanthropist for Birthright. And his name is Sheldon Adelson. He's given more money than anyone else by a lot. And we should all be appreciative.

So my question to you, because, you know, we actually at Fifth Avenue Synagogue, you know, what you did with Birthright, you know, these people get inspired. They want to come to Friday night dinner. They want a home. They want a synagogue. And that's, you know, we want to welcome them. But I have found, and again, I don't have a lot of experience, but because you gave them a free trip where they didn't contribute at all, I find if I offered a free dinner, they would all come. But if I want to charge, they say, 'Oh, it costs money,' and it changes their perspective. And that kind of bothers me.

You make a very good point. When you give things away for nothing, there's a consequence. And with Birthright being so successful, there have been a few programs that have given away things for nothing. And I think it's unfortunate, but perhaps it's been necessary to get this ball rolling. But your point is a good point.

Okay, it's something I'd like to follow up with you. So, David, can we commit that you and Michael will come back? Because I feel like we're just warming up and we're way over the hour that you promised us. And, Michael, can we commit to another follow-up Zoom with Ezra?

But the next topic is going to be sex.

We are an Orthodox synagogue, so I don't know if that will work.

Okay.

We can find another good topic. Okay, but Michael, a happy belated birthday. And now that you live, uh, near our synagogue, uh, have you moved into the new apartment yet? Not yet, but you're right, we're only two blocks away, so we're gonna, uh, expect you. It'll be another synagogue that I don't show up at. Perfect. Right, right. And when you recite the—your list of synagogues and—and try to say, 'We've got to resolve this puzzle,' it'll add one more to the puzzle. That'd be great. Right.

Michael, just my thanks. Very much appreciated the time, the effort, and the preparation that you put into it. And you and I have been doing this a long time, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Good.

And David, you made the whole thing work. So thank you to you.

Thank you, Rabbi Babich. Thank you, Ezra, David, Jacob. Truly a pleasure.

Thank you. The pleasure was ours. The honor was ours. Thank you, guys.

Good night, everybody. Bye. Happy Hanukkah, everybody.